Not to echo my statement yesterday but I'm SO done with mainstream news.

"Halo 3 doesn't make you Jesus."

Well, shit. Better drop it from my GameFly queue then.

Bungie, you've let me down. Hard.

Yikes. David Pogue is not amused.

Halo 3 doesn't make you Jesus
you'd be surprised. If you played a douche winning 2 games in a row, they'll spew how powerful and almighty he/she is.

man thoset new york times fact checkers are on the ball here!

Silly mainstream media. They should really use wikipedia.

I agree with the tag. LOL

not surprising coming from the new yuck slimes

It's a shame this is the kind of news being broadcasted to people >_>

Wow, it literally takes a second to find real info. on wiki, I wonder why the reporters just bsed it, such garbage..

When was the last time the NYT ever checked any of their sources before reporting something? I really don't expect much more from them then this. Actually, I'm surprised they actually know what companies make the systems.

Nobody will ever understand us like you do Michael. *sigh*

Proof that those outside the video game news industry, really don't know much about video games and how to cover them.

Master Chief is the new Beatles, which were the old Jesus.

Oh, make fun of the Times, will you? We'll see who's laughing when the Halo players come walking over water to deliver you the hyper-realistic journey that is GT5 on your $300 PS3.

Doesn't make you Jesus, huh? Let's do some logic chaining. Jesus is part of the holy trinity, that trinity is god. God hates fags (reference, a billboard some nutty guy screaming random things was wearing.) Halo 3 players also hate homosexuals, as evidenced by recent videos. Therefore if Halo 3 doesn't make you Jesus, it at least makes you a bit more like him.

It's kinda fitting, given that Halo's story oozes biblical references out of every pore.

Another article linked on the same page extols Mass Effect's facial animation as some kind of landmark in game storytelling, conveniently ignoring the fact that Half-Life 2 came out four years ago.

Mainstream media durrrr

"New York Times Doesn't Know From Video Games"

Does this title make sense to anyone else? I'm trying to figure out if I'm reading it wrong or something. I figure the "From" shouldn't be there.

Articles like these make my eyes hurt. Not only is it factually incorrect, but it is poorly written. Its structure, style and flow is horrendous. At least Jason Blair's pieces were good reads, factual or not.

What I find most entertaining about the trader was not his comparison of Halo 3's goodness equating to manna from heaven, but the guy has the smugness to declare that he owns three of the systems! If I wanted any success at finding a mate, I wouldn't admit to owning more than two of one machine - one for the living room and one for the bedroom. Where the heck are you putting the third?!?

It seems NY has "The Hillary Effect".

@vizion:
Yeah I was wondering that too...

It's from the future. In the future, GT5 will be a best-seller, the Ps3 will cost $300, and Microsoft will switch over to Cell.

The NY Times are actually PSYCHIC!

@concrete_d: Mass Effect allows for smooth facial animation of a custom-designed face, one the user generates. Half-Life, while having remarkable facial animations, can't claim the same. So, in a way, Mass Effect is breaking ground there.

To be fair to the NY Times, in mainstream journalism this is called a "fluff piece".

I know in video game writing this is the equivalent of hard news. But really, it's not. It's a buyer's guide in a real newspaper. It was probably written by an intern. Not that that excuses poor fact checking, but let's say Ashcraft wrote an overnight post here about Japanese toilet paper and toilet paper dispensers, and he got the pricing wrong on a major brand of Japanese toilet paper and said it was made out of parchment instead of cotton. Would you all be screaming about how he got his facts wrong about Japanese toilet paper? That's the equivalent of this to the New York Times.

think about people, if they don't do their research for things like this, who says the other stuff IS correct.

the media are liars, and mostly out of sheer lazyness.

The retraction is going to be really long:

The Playstation 3 game Gran Turismo 5 does not actually exist as of yet, and therefore it has not sold any copies, much less been a best seller. However, the demo is out and though it does not feature any "journeys", it does in fact feature what one would more precisely call "races," which fans of the series actually prefer to journeys. Microsoft does not actually use the Cell processor, which was designed by its competitor Sony for use in the PS3, but it does use a multi-core processor.

Furthermore, we apologize for referring to the PS3 as "that Sony console" and hope that none of our actual news stories(as opposed to this glorified ad/fluff piece) are so poorly edited and fact-checked.

We also apologize for getting such a crummy quote referring to Halo as the, "latest and greatest game people that are walking on water over." This is not an actual figure of speech, it is the result of our reporter trying to speak to an average trader from a Wall Street Bank, who in not used to verbal interaction with other humans, preferring to crunch numbers all day and then unwind by playing all 3 of his 360's at the same time.

edit: "that people are walking on water over"

That's positively pitiful.

"Hillary effect"???

Try "BUSH effect".

It's where a person has no idea about details or facts. Yeesh.

It made ME Jesus.

You thought the 360 had RROD problems now. Just imagine that thing running cell processors.

@badasscat: All the News That's Fit to Print indeed. If you bother to write about it, the info should be correct. Personally, I think that bloggers (no offense Kotaku) should not be held to the same high standard as one of the most well-respected newspapers in the world. Sure, it's not a big deal, but someone got paid to write the article, and someone got paid to fact-check it. This is the sort of information that could have been found on Amazon.com or wikipedia in a matter of seconds. Fluff piece or not, it's shoddy journalism.

NY Times, let me make work for you and make things better. I'm in college right now, but I'm sure I don't need one to work for a company like yours seeing that you threw about 3 false statements into one article. College teaches you that it's not legal to do that. The editor should be ashamed.

I can't agree that this is forgivable. This is plain laziness on the part of the journalist. Even a casual wikipedia search would have reliably corrected these inaccuracies.
It may not be a story of great importance relative to other things that are going on, but incorrect reportage should never be tolerated in any form at any level, and the NY Times should be pushed to publish a correction.

Holy crap. Have they ever heard of Google? Wikipedia?!

The problem here is they hire communications, english, and journalism majors to report news. It might be written fairly well, but the facts come out convoluted and sketchy at best.

My solution would be to start hiring social studies/humanities majors who probably have just as much if not more college writing experience, and that experience is more in line with informing the public when it comes to the details/facts in stories.

Well, on the upside, if you're reading the NYT as your primary source of video game information, you're probably too old to have interest in any console other than the Wii (which your people love apparently).

@badasscat:

To be fair, the quality of NYT reporting has been on a steady decline for the past 10 years, and serves only as a delivery medium for crossword puzzles.

Jason Blair is a good example, though my favorite is their well-known vandalism of Wikipedia entries:

"Someone using a computer on the Times' network also altered the entry for Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, changing the word "pianist" to "penis."(Wikipedia)

Yes, bravo, New York Times.

'People' magazine has more journalistic integrity than this rag.

@Kevin_the_Sony_Fan:

Oh, they've heard of Wikipedia.

Hey NY Times! There's this thing called "Google"...

I heard Halo 4 is going to be so good, it will make people turn water into wine over it.

The only way Halo 3 could sell any better: If it made you Jesus.

Last I checked, the Assassin's...

Sorry, Journalist's Creed involved Rule # 1: All rules are Rule # 1.

Rule # 1: Check your fact. Then make sure the thing sounds right. Then double check it. And then double check it again.

Anyone remember when every few articles contained maybe one small error that was obviously easy to miss? Now I have to wonder if the people who get credit actually did the investigation itself, or if someone gathers the facts, someone else writes it, and then some moron does a quick once-over and corrects and obvious errors.

Personally, I don't think many people can quite handle the idea of a whole new culture just popping up, nor can they handle the fact that the world around them is changing exponentially faster. I supposed getting their facts straight about a whole different culture, especially one that just popped up and has been growing a lot lately, makes it a little hard to double check everything. It probably doesn't help that Internet culture is so insane and out of the ordinary. Many people I know seem to have a hard time grasping that internet culture is a culture, and that just because we live in the same country that doesn't mean I have the same standards.

I think we've all seen the news report focusing on Halo 3 that discusses the evils of Xbox Live chat. Yes, it's a stinking hell-hole of insults, but it's generally accepted and often ignored there. But if you were to go up to just about anyone on the street and play some clips, they'd probably think the people saying it are angry lunatics.

For me, I've long sense given up on what many consider "socially acceptable behavior" because honestly, I don't give a crap what other people think anymore, and internet humor is much funnier than anything "normal" people do. Of course this leads to people trying to convince me what I am doin gis not "acceptable" to them, which only further seperates me from hope for humanity.

Point is, they can't be expected to have the details as straight as us, who live those details every day. But they are journalists, and that's there job: get facts straight and report them. Though I supposed that went straight down the pooper with all the fancy graphics and generic ugly "reporters" with the same way of speaking and same fake looks with the aid of fancy graphics.

I am still in shock that major news media outlets do not have a fact checker that knows how to use the internet enough to not make them look like a technological illiterate man from the 1920's wrote it.

I propose a "Six Degrees of Separation" contest. Start with the Cell, end with Jesus. Go!

@ElGatoMalo:

Fair enough, and I didn't know that. I still take issue at the article's main point, which is that Mass Effect's facial animation and story somehow elevates it into true gaming art by virtue of being more like live-action movies. It's seeming to say that games can't be emotionally or artistically relevant without imitating a separate, well established art form as closely as possible.

Lies, damn lies!
Halo 3 had nothing to do with my username!

This is obviously a jab at Sony; in fact it was a KO punch.

It's a set up.

People considering a PS3 go to walmart and find out that it's 399.00 instead of 299.00; they say "The NY Times says it's 299.00 and has a brilliant racing game called Gran Turismo 5!" Walmart employee then says "The only system we have here close to 299.00 is the 279.00 arcade xbox 360" and also the 249.00 Nintendo Wii.

Things like this don't happen by mistake.

Ummm, as far as the PS3 pricing goes, I believe BJ's had them for $299.00 this last week.
It was $399.00 with a $100.00 instant rebate; so that actually was accurate. (though it was probably a happy accident)
Now if I could get my hands on a copy of GT5...

Indeed, the Wii is often sold at the MSRP of $250.00. That said, are there any NYers out there who would be interested in a "Dan Strack Is An Idiot" T-shirt a la CafePress.

I'm thinking basic black or white with XBox green lettering in the XBox 360 typeface, with three silhouetted 360 consoles behind the letters.

They have an Isaac Mendez clone with same powers so he just get high with big doses of black coffe mixed with any energy drink. Then he just write about the future instead of draw it :)

Simple!

@concrete_d: Um, they are sounding like a Yiddish grandmother from New York.

David Pogue and John Burns are pretty good, the rest are just a bunch of Jayson Blairs waiting to happen. For those waiting for the NYT to correct / retract, don't bother, they routinely make grevious errors on much bigger issues and don't correct.